SenseWall: Open, Free Platform for Multi-Touch, More; Wants Your Work

Multi-touch walls have been a closely-guarded novelty, but they’re evolving into something else: a real, usable platform that focuses on content and not just gimmicks. In the process, a hard-working community is building richer, standards-based, cross-platform, free and open source tools. The result: faster iteration, broader access of artists to the technology, and soon, hopefully, better and better work.

Tiago Serra writes with his latest project, based on the Community Core Vision project. He includes a call for works that I think a number of CDM readers may want to check out.

SenseBloom recently developed a multitouch wall called SenseWall, located at a Computer Science and Design university in Portugal.

In terms of hardware, the display has an area of 2.8m x 1.05m and it consists of 2 XGA ultra short-throw projectors amounting to a total resolution of 2048×768. For the multitouch sensing, this is an LLP setup using 8 infrared lasers, 2 PS3 Eye cameras and a custom compiled version of the excellent CCV tracker (ccv.nuigroup.com), giving us a touch resolution of 1280×480.

This installation is an open platform for anyone interested in doing something with it. Although it is a multitouch enabled surface it also has a pair of cameras at the top for computer vision applications, a microphone for sound input, speakers for sound output and an RFID reader (http://www.touchatag.com). So there’s lots one can do with it.

By open platform we mean that our intent is to have college students use it at will, being in class courses or just for fun.
A webapp is being developed by a few students so that anyone can upload their apps through a web interface making them available instantly on the SenseWall. This will be also open sourced once finished on GoogleCode.

At the SenseWall there’s an “app launcher” showing the available applications name, author and date.

Our main purpose with this installation is to let pupils learn new HCI concepts and hilight their creativity by giving them the tool to do so. Only if we had something like it when in college 😛

We really enjoy you’re work so I’d like to invite you to submit any TUIO (http://tuio.org) based app, or any other app that uses micro/vision/rfid, you’d like to see there, and we’ll be more than happy to send you a video of it.
We do feel that it is also a great opportunity to showcase any artist/designer/coder.